Basics of Selenium Every Beginner Should Know About What is Selenium?

It is a free or open-source automated testing suite for web applications on various browsers and platforms. It is very similar to HP Quick Test Pro or QTP now UFT, however, Selenium centralizes on automating web based applications. Selenium tool based testing is often known as Selenium testing. It is just a single tool but a software suite, each tool catering to various testing requirements of a company. There are many systems available in the markets which enhance the power of Selenium. Selenium has four components.

Selenium Grid

Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

Selenium Remote Control (RC)

WebDriver

Birth of Selenium

It was invented by Jason Huggins in the year 2004. He was working on a web application that needs frequent testing. As the time went by, an epiphany struck that the repetitious manual testing was proving inefficient, he developed a JavaScript program that would control the browser actions automatically. He termed it ‘JavaScriptTestRunner’. This helped in automating the other web applications and renamed it Selenium Core.

Birth of Selenium Remote Control (Selenium RC)

Unluckily, Selenium Core requires the entire application under test and the web server on their own computer systems due to the limitations raised by the same origin policy. So, another engineer, Paul Hammant, built a server that will act as an HTTP proxy to trick the browser that Selenium Core and the tested web application is derived from the same domain. This system was then known as the Selenium Remote Control or Selenium 1.

Birth of Selenium Grid

It was invented by Patrick Lightbody to look after the requirement of minimizing the test execution times frequent times. At first, he developed a system called Hosted QA. It had the capability to capture browser screenshots in the important stages and simultaneously dispersing out Selenium commands to various machines.

Birth of Selenium IDE

Selenium IDE was created by Shinya Kasatani of Japan. IDE is a Firefox extension that helps in automating the browser via record and playback feature. This was created in order to accelerate the speed in creating test cases. Then the Selenium IDE was donated to Selenium project in the year 2006.

Birth of WebDriver

It was created by Simon Stewart circa 2006 when the web applications and browsers were becoming more potent and restrictive along with JavaScript programs such as Selenium Core. WebDriver was the first cross-platform testing framework that had control over the browser from the OS level.